Yeah, the private fiefdom of funding Parkinson's research. Just like the dark ages. Clearly a real piece of shit.
It's an understandable strategy, though also self serving. They could instead aspire to have the largest possible positive impact across all of humanity. This is the basis for the argument that it's not right for any single human to be entrusted with such a disproportionately high amount of discretionary resources.
Edit: My mistake, you posted a nearly identical comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34376436
So sorry for the confusion! Thank you for ensuring the mark of anm89 is uniformly applied.
I'm honestly curious as to what other thread you think I deleted something off.
If I had to characterize it: giving money to charitable causes that benefit you indicates a heternomous will, which in turn voids the act of any moral value. It might be beneficial to society for Brin to plow his money into Parkinson's research, but he gets no particular praise (or fault) for doing a thing that benefits him.
And why the false dichotomy that we must choose our masters at all? We certainly have the bureaucratic capabilities to redistribute extreme wealth without a guillotine or Molotov in sight.
If half of this fund went into the hands of the homeless or food relief for Ukraine, would you say it was any less well invested?
We are frogs, boiling in a world of superyachts and vanity funds. We can do better.